Observations on articles I read to keep current about technology. My interests are: Privacy, security, business, the computer industry, and geeky stuff that catches my eye.

I don't think I have an agenda beyond my own amusement.

Note that I lump all my comments into a single post. This is not a typical BLOG technique, It's just an indication that I'm lazy.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

If
this had been done in the US we might have the security tipping point
I've been dreaming of... Then again, probably not. (Pay up, or
we'll automagically submit 10,000 bogus pizza orders an hour.
There's an App for that!)

Hackers have
reportedly stolen data of more than 600,000 Domino’s Pizza
customers. A group of hackers demand € 30,000 before next Monday
or they will make captured data public. The hacker group goes by the
name Rex Mundi and claims to have hacked the websites of Domino’s
Pizza in France and Belgium. They’ve announced their hack in a
Tweet and disclosed further details in an anonymous
text file.

In the statement they write, “We downloaded over 592,000 customer
records (including passwords) from French customers and over 58,000
records from Belgian ones. That’s over six hundred thousand
records, which include the customers’ full names, addresses, phone
numbers, email addresses, passwords and delivery instructions. (Oh,
and their favorite pizza topping as well, because why not).”

The group demands €30,000 to not disclose the information and to
reinforce the threat they already posted samples of the stolen data.
According to the hackers they’ve contacted Domino’s Pizza but the
company has not responded to their demands so far. A
Belgian newspaper reports the company has
contacted all affected customers and argues no credit
card information has been compromised.

Iraq's
communications ministry has ordered Internet and mobile companies to
block social media websites and applications as militants drive
towards Baghdad, technicians from two major service providers said
Friday.

The
technicians said video-sharing site YouTube, social network site
Facebook, micro-blogging site Twitter and communications applications
WhatsApp and Viber were all affected.

A federal judge today ordered
the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”)
so the judge can directly review whether information about mass
surveillance was improperly withheld from the public.

The order is another victory in EFF’s Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit against the DOJ, which sought to reveal how the government
uses Section 215 of the Patriot Act to secretly gather communications
records from millions of American citizens. The suit has already
forced the government to releasethousands
of pages of FISA court opinions, internal executive branch
reports, congressional briefings, and other documents concerning
Section 215. Documents released as part of the suit have shown the
NSA repeatedly
misled the FISA court concerning the operation of the bulk call
records program, nearly leading
the court to terminate the program altogether.

EFF Staff Attorney Mark Rumold argued for further disclosure of
records during a June
3 hearing in Oakland. The resulting order, issued today, applies
to 66 pages of five still-secret FISA court opinions. While Judge
Yvonne Gonzales-Rogers may ultimately decide the documents cannot be
released, her order reveals an appreciation of the civil liberties
concerns as well as skepticism of the government’s blanket refusal
to release any portion of the opinions.

Read
more on EFF,
and congratulations to Mark Rumold for this great WIN!

Is
Google preparing a Doctor App? (Is it harder than self-driving
cars?) Once upon a time, long, long ago, only you and your Doctor
knew what was happening in your body. Now you have become just
another Thing plugged into the Internet of Things. Now everyone
everywhere can know everything. (I suppose there are a few crazy
people out there who will want to post recordings of their
colonoscopy on YouTube for our enjoyment. Please don't.)

Google
Inc is developing a service that will combine information from health
apps and personal fitness devices, in another competitive move
against Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, Forbes reported.

The
new service, to be called Google Fit, will make its debut at the
Internet company's developer conference later this month, Forbes said
on Thursday, citing anonymous sources.

…
Health data could become the next big battleground among tech
companies as a new generation of wearable electronic gadgets allow
users to measure heart rates, sleep patterns and exercise activities.

Last
week Apple announced "Healthkit," which will pull together
data such as blood pressure and weight now collected by a growing
number of healthcare apps on the iPhone or iPad. In May, Samsung
launched a health platform for third-party app developers.

(Related)
Does this suggest what Google will do with your health data?

Drchrono,
a Moutain View, California startup has developed an application that
let's a doctor register with them and use their Google Glass to
record a consultation or surgery with a patient's permission.
Videos, photos, and notes are all stored in an electronic medical
record (EMR) and stored in the cloud to share with the patient upon
request.

Last
December Apple met with the FDA to get some clarification about what
types of health apps and devices would or would not fall under FDA
rules and regulations. It’s an interesting question that a lot of
device makers are going to have to consider as more and more
health-oriented wearables come to market.

Under
Section 13402(i) of HITECH, HHS is required to submit to Congress an
annual report containing the number and nature of breaches reported,
and the actions taken in response to those breaches. Section
13424(2) of the HITECH Act requires the Secretary to make each report
available to the public on the HHS website.

HHS
had issued one report for 2009-2010, and has now issued its report
for the period January 1, 2011 – December 31, 2012:

I
haven’t had time to really read through this yet, but at first
glance, it appears that while theft continues to be
the single largest category of breaches (with hacking being a second
prominent category), loss accounted for the largest
percentage of individuals affected in 2011 breaches. Additionally,
while breach reports from business associates accounted for
approximately one fourth of breach reports in 2011 and 2012, they
accounted for 64% and 42% of individuals affected in those years.

I’ll
likely have more to say once I’ve had time to really go through the
report carefully.

You
have received an email from a person with whom you have never
interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation
forward, you would like to do a bit of research for that person on
the Internet. How do you do this without directly asking the other
person?

…
With a tap you can now seamlessly go from reading to listening
without losing your place in the book. The Audible audiobook service
has been integrated in the Kindle apps for iOS and Android by
piggybacking on the Whispersync
for Voice feature.

The
Android and iOS apps can be downloaded from the respective stores.

NimbleTV,
in contrast, is trying to
do online live television legally. You can connect the
service with your existing cable stations, or pay for a direct
subscription to watch cable TV online.

…
If you’re looked into LiveStation,
which lets you watch
live TV news online, you’ll find a similar lineup of news
channels: Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, RT and CSPAN are a few examples.
You’ll also find AntennaTV, which mostly airs reruns of
black-and-white sitcoms.

…
Announcing
Unizin: “Unizin
is a strategic move by universities to assert greater control and
influence over the digital-learning landscape than would otherwise be
possible by any single institution." The four founding
institutions are Colorado
State University,
Indiana University, the University of Florida, and the University of
Michigan. Why
Unizin?:

As professors and members of
the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring
that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content,
data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at
the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we
want to bias things in the direction of open standards,
interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in
favor of the academy by
collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the
essential infrastructure
that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond.

The
platform for Unizin will be Instructure
Canvas, because
”banding
together" to resist outsourcing definitely starts with a
shared LMS made by a third party vendor. [Is
a proprietary infrastructure the best way to go? I think not. Bob]

…
The company says it learned about the security breach on Tuesday
from the U.S. Secret Service and began investigating the breach with
the agency and a team of forensics experts. It found that credit
card and debit cards were exposed, but it doesn’t know yet when it
started happening and which stores were affected.

…
The malware, called POSCLOUD by IntelCrawler, targets cloud-based
PoS software commonly used by grocery stores, retailers, and other
small businesses, the company wrote in a report released Wednesday.

The Jersey City school district is investigating how a Sherman Avenue
charter school obtained personal information about district students,
data that parents believe the charter school used to mail the
students and their parents registration forms last month.

Schools Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles revealed some details of the
investigation at a citywide meeting with parents last night, with
attendees telling The Jersey Journal that Lyles said METS Charter
School obtained students’ names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of
birth and possibly even social security numbers.

METS may have accessed the
information via district computers that weren’t safeguarded to keep
outsiders from obtaining student data, Lyles said,
according to parents who attended the meeting.

“We are currently trying to determine what happened,” district
spokeswoman Maryann Dickar told The Jersey Journal in an email. “We
have had conversations with METS Charter and we expect resolution
early next week.”

There'a
a key nugget buried in this
morning's New York Times story about how Facebook is
going to give its users the ability to see why certain ads are
targeted to them. Starting
this week, the Timesreports, "the
company will tap data it already collects from people’s smartphones
and other websites they visit to improve its ad targeting.
Users can opt out of such extended tracking, but they will have to
visit a special ad
industry websiteand
adjust their smartphone settings to do so."

In
other words, Facebook is giving users a glimpse of what marketers
already know about them, but it is also going to give marketers more
information about users—which makes sense, given that Facebook's
business model is largely built on the data you provide.

“It's
time we stop ignoring this troublesome law and overturn it!” Is
wasting money on cases you know you can't win the best strategy these
bozos can think of?

The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office is asking county
prosecutors statewide for their help in overturning a 32-year-old
state Supreme Court precedent that requires a warrant to obtain
telephone billing records.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Susswein wants them to bring test
cases where they will likely lose at the trial and Appellate Division
levels, in the hope that the issue will eventually percolate up to
the high court, according to his June 10 memo, obtained by the New
Jersey Law Journal.

As a result of the revelations of the vast foreign and domestic
surveillance programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA),
the U.S. Congress is at least trying to rein in some of the NSA’s
powers. Unfortunately, despite all we know about the Canadian
government’s involvement in the NSA’s mass surveillance programs,
this country is moving in the opposite direction by making it easier
for government officials to gather information about Canadians’
online activities.

Bill C-13, colloquially known as the cyberbullying bill, is currently
being studied by a parliamentary committee. The term
“cyberbullying,” however, is a bit of a misnomer. In a stunning
display of political opportunism, the government has trotted out
parents whose children have tragically taken their own lives after
being bullied online. But nowhere in the bill do the words “cyber”
or “bully” actually appear.

Other
than having strangers parked near the house like those moochers at
Starbucks, I'm not sure this is such a bad idea. My Ethical Hackers
should be able to “discover” a way past the two hour limit, so I
should be able to use my non-techie neighbor's wifi for free.

Thousands
of cable internet customers in Colorado will soon be helping Comcast
provide wireless internet to the public - whether they know it or
not.

…
The company says it's already done so with one million customers and
counting.

…
Comcast said its free for its cable service customers. [This
means you must identify yourself wherever you use their service.
Bob]

…
9news spoke with Jefferson Graham, a tech columnist for USA Today.
For him, the concept raises more questions than answers over privacy.

"By
making so many WiFi signals out there more available, of course it's
making it available to hackers, although of course Comcast would say
no it's not," Graham said.

It's
a fear echoed by University
of Denver law professor John Soma. After studying
privacy law for more than three decades, Soma says security is rarely
certain.

"I'm
very confident that at least a middle schooler or high school kid
somewhere in the world will be able to [hack into your router],"
Soma said.

This
Thing could really rat you out. “Your cup has testified that you
had three Harvey Wallbangers before you tried to drive home...”
(If you have to ask your cup what you are drinking, you should have
stopped drinking several drinks ago.)

…
Their cup -- a slim, slightly hefty thermos-looking receptacle --
will not only identify and track what you drink and how much of it,
but can do so on the fly as it senses the liquid type and breaks it
down to its most vital components as soon as it interacts with the
cup's sensor-filled interior. The ultimate utility with Vessyl is
not to provide novelty, but to transform how we consume every ounce
of liquid throughout the day.

Caffeine
and sugar amounts, alongside calorie count and a proprietary metric
for hydration called Pryme, are tracked
through an app on your phone, and bits of that information
are also displayed on a
screen embedded within the cup itself. The display
glimmers to life only when new liquids are poured in to notify you
that, yes, you are drinking coffee -- and here's how much caffeine
that particular brew will put into your system. A small pillar of
light also tells you how drinking that particular amount of that
particular liquid will hurt or help your level of hydration as well.

The
ACLU has created a map that tracks “what we know, based on press
reports and publicly available documents, about the use of stingray
tracking devices by state and local police departments.” Following
the map is a list of the federal law enforcement agencies
known to use the technology throughout the United States.

“In
the 1970s, the Supreme Court handed down Smith v. Maryland and United
States v. Miller, two of the most important Fourth Amendment
decisions of the 20th century. In these cases, the Court held that
people are not entitled to an expectation of privacy in information
they voluntarily provide to third parties. This legal proposition,
known as the third-party doctrine, permits the government access to,
as a matter of Fourth Amendment law, a vast amount of information
about individuals, such as the websites they visit; who they have
emailed; the phone numbers they dial; and their utility, banking, and
education records, just to name a few. Questions
have been raised whether this doctrine is still viable in light of
the major technological and social changes over the past several
decades. Before there were emails, instant messaging, and
other forms of electronic communication, it was much easier for the
courts to determine if a government investigation constituted a
Fourth Amendment “search.” If the police intruded on your
person, house, papers, or effects—tangible property interests
listed in the text of the Fourth Amendment—that act was considered
a search, which had to be “reasonable” under the circumstances.
However, with the advent of intangible forms of communication, like
the telephone or the Internet, it became much more difficult for
judges to determine when certain surveillance practices intruded upon
Fourth Amendment rights. With Katz v. United States, the Court
supposedly remedied this by declaring that the Fourth Amendment
protects not only a person’s tangible things, but additionally, his
right to privacy. Katz, however, left unprotected anything a person
knowingly exposes to the public. This idea would form the basis of
Smith and Miller. In those cases, the Court held that a customer has
no reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers he dials
(Smith) and in checks and deposit slips he gives to his bank
(Miller), as he has exposed them to another and assumed the risk they
could be handed over to the government.”

How
does this work? The FBI “leaks” your name to several newspapers
when you had no involvement and then “clears” you. If he was
never involved, how was his name connected to the investigation? The
FBI still lives in the Hoover “publicity seeking” culture.

Even
people leaking information to the press about sensitive government
investigations make mistakes. The golf pro Phil Mickelson, who was
implicated in an insider trading-investigation in articles in the
Wall
Street Journal and the New
York Timeson May 30, may not be a target of the
investigation.

According
to both news organizations, the FBI in New York and the Security and
Exchange Commission have for two years been investigating well-timed
trades in Clorox (CLX)
involving Carl Icahn, Mickelson, and professional gambler Billy
Walters. Mickelson was said to have traded Clorox, possibly based on
tips about Icahn’s investing activities that were transmitted
through Walters, a sometime golf and poker partner and friend to both
men. But as the Timesreported
on Thursday:

Although Mr. Icahn and Mr. Walters remain under investigation over
Clorox, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission have found
no evidence that Mr. Mickelson traded Clorox shares. The overstated
scope of the investigation came from information provided to The
Times by other people briefed on the matter who have since
acknowledged making a mistake.

…
The events highlight the devastating impact of such leaks on
everyone involved. For Icahn, Walters, and Mickelson—all of whom
deny wrongdoing—the story causes distraction and serious
reputational damage, which can have an immediate impact on an
athlete’s endorsement deals. For FBI and SEC
investigators doing the work of assembling evidence and trying to put
cases together, media exposure can shut inquiries down and derail
lines of investigation. They
can no longer deploy covert methods [Did they say that? I call that
statement BS! Bob] such as wiretaps and confidential
informants, which have been powerful tools in such cases, and there
is potential for evidence to be destroyed.

Why
the surprise? Did they think beer was made with the livers of
endangered species? It's beer! I imagine Budweiser thought the
ingredients were obvious.

...
A popular blogger known as the "food babe" started a
petition
asking major brewers to list their ingredients. The petition picked
up steam, gathering more than 40,000 signatures in 24 hours.

The
company responded surprisingly fast, listing its ingredients on the
website tapintoyourbeer.com.
It turns out Bud and Bud
Light have only five ingredients: water, barley malt, rice, yeast and
hops.

A
couple of summers ago Google offered a MOOC about search skills. The
content of that course is still available online for anyone to use at
his or her own pace.

Power
Searching With Google provides six units of study on search
strategies. Each unit includes slides, videos, and text. Examples
of how each strategy works in practice are provided by Daniel
Russell, Google's search anthropologist.

Advanced
Power Searching With Google is full of challenges through which
you can test your power searching skills. The challenges include
helpful videos and texts to consult when you get stuck on a
challenge. When you think that you have successfully completed a
challenge, you can check your answer before moving to your next
challenge.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Similar
to the Sochi 2014 Olympics and all other major sporting events before
it, the FIFA
World Cup 2014 in Brazil is being leveraged by cybercriminals and
scammers as a means to lure victims for their attacks.

…
Cybercriminals
are relying on the FIFA World Cup to trick users into installing
malware
on their computers. Trend Micro discovered
a campaign targeting customers of a Brazilian ticketing website,
where the attackers managed to obtain the personal details of the
site’s users and sent them fake raffle emails containing links to
the BANLOAD banking Trojan.

Trend
Micro’s researchers also stumbled
upon a BLADABINDI backdoor disguised as a FIFA World Cup streaming
application, and a piece of adware (ADW_INSTALLREX) disguised as a
key generator for the FIFA 14 video game.

…
Twitter has created "starter kits" for each of the sides
playing the Mundial. Each one has about 90 Twitter accounts that
help you follow what's happening in real time. If you were a new
user and didn't know how to follow soccer on the service, this would
instantly put you in the real-time networks that talk about the
sport.

EFF
- “Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors
Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed
down a decision
that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a
major book scanning program. For those counting along at home,
today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial
findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors
Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker,
and the
district court opinion in the HathiTrust
case itself. Given that
consistent fair use record for book digitization, today’s ruling
might not be totally surprising. Still,
the text of the opinion is encouraging, and reflects a court that
respects the Constitutional purpose of copyright as a tool to promote
the progress of science and the useful arts—not a blunt instrument
for rightsholders to regulate all downstream uses.
HathiTrust
was set up by several research universities to operate a digital
library containing electronic scans of the universities’ books
(Google provided the scans as part of its Google Books project). The
Authors Guild took issue with three practices that HathiTrust engages
in: a full-text database that returns the book name and page number
for matching search results; a service to make text available in
formats accessible to print-disabled people; and a long-term archive
to preserve books that might become unavailable during the term of
their copyright restrictions. With respect to the full-text
database, the court found that although a copy of the entire work is
made, the purpose of a
full-text searchable database is so different from that of the
underlying works that the use must be considered transformative.
In fact, the court wrote, “the creation of a full‐text
searchable database is a quintessentially transformative use”.
[Thanks to Gloria Miccioli]

Here's
a thing that won't be on the Internet of Things and therefore won't
be hackable. (No scenarios like the current “24”)
Unfortunately, it won't be controllable remotely either. The
programming has to work the first time and every time in every
possible situation.

“Although
remote-controlled robots flying over the Middle East and Central Asia
now dominate reports on new military technologies, robots that are
capable of detecting, identifying, and killing enemies on their own
are quietly but steadily
moving from the theoretical to the practical. The
enormous difficulty in assigning responsibilities to humans and
states for the actions of these machines grows with their increasing
autonomy. These developments implicate serious legal, ethical, and
societal concerns. This Article focuses on the accountability of
states and underlying human responsibilities for autonomous weapons
under International Humanitarian Law or the Law of Armed Conflict.
After reviewing the evolution of autonomous weapon systems and
diminishing human involvement in these systems along a continuum of
autonomy, this Article argues that the elusive search for individual
culpability for the actions of autonomous weapons foreshadows
fundamental problems in assigning responsibility to states for the
actions of these machines. It further argues that the central legal
requirement relevant to determining accountability (especially for
violation of the most important international legal obligations
protecting the civilian population in armed conflicts) is human
judgment. Access to effective human judgment already appears to be
emerging as the deciding factor in establishing practical
restrictions and framing legal concerns with respect to the
deployment of the most advanced autonomous weapons.”

…
Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile
combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for
modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields.
He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the
lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language
capable of crossing the boundaries between them.

Wiener
was 69 when he died of a heart attack in 1964. He’s come to mind
recently because a conference dedicated to reclaiming his reputation
is scheduled in Boston later this month. Sponsored by the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Norbert
Wiener in the 21st Century will feature a series of
papers and panels demonstrating not only that Wiener was ahead of his
time, but that now his time has finally come. Indeed, engineers
who are well grounded in cybernetic theory will tell you
technology is just catching up with ideas Wiener proposed more than
half a century ago.

…
Yet, much sooner and more thoroughly than could have been expected,
memory of Wiener and of his contributions faded. Several reasons
account for his eclipse. One is that during the height of his
career, Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research
contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit
his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources
of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during
a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear
weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was
most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than
most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of
labor, and how eager they were to do so. "Those who suffer from
a power complex," he wrote in 1950, "find the mechanization
of man a simple way to realize their ambitions."

Strange
things on the Internet of Things, but will this technology prevent
riots? If so, it's priceless.

In
1966, British soccer legend Geoff Hurst booted a right-foot shot
against Germany in the World Cup championship game. The ball struck
the top crossbar and rifled down near the goal line before spinning
out.

Confusion
ensued; it was impossible to tell if the ball had crossed the plane.

Eventually,
officials awarded the goal, and England secured its first and only
World Cup victory.

Try
not to remind German fans.

…
According to official estimates, FIFA is paying a small German
start-up nearly $3.5 million to operate its new goal-line technology
in the 2014
World Cup, which kicks off Thursday in Brazil.

The
company, called GoalControl,
would install 14 cameras
in each of the 12 World Cup stadiums that triangulate the motion of
the ball with maximum precision: up
to 500 images per second.

With
that tracking, plus sensors on the goal line, GoalControl can
instantly alert a referee when the ball crosses the line. There's
no need to consult a replay booth or another official; the referee in
charge merely looks at their smartwatch.

Who
is doing this? Note to students. I probably will not answer your
emails in 15 minutes.

–
Reply right away to emails. With relative timestamps in Gmail, you
can see how long an email has been sitting in your inbox. Reply
while the time is still green. Timestamps turn yellow after 15
minutes and red after an hour. Extensions are available for both
Chrome and Firefox.

–
will say anything you type in their own voice. Just type a message
to create fun, animated, talking stickers to send to your friends or
post on social networks. Talkz also supports huge groups and has
Voice, Pictures, Doodles, Video, Location, and Music. Talkz supports
user-generated talking stickers, so there’s no end to your
creativity.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

There
are many details in a complete Security plan. I've blogged
repeatedly about companies not looking at (or even generating) logs.
This is another area where today's “cost” overrides future
“risks.” Organizations know they should do it, but it takes
skills and dollars.

SQL
injection attacks are far from new, and the consequences of being
vulnerable to them are hardly unknown.

However,
a survey of 595 IT security experts indicates that many organizations
may not be doing enough to address them. According to a survey by
the Ponemon Institute, only
33 percent said their organizations were scanning their active
databases either continuously or daily. Forty-seven
percent said they did it irregularly or not at all. Despite those
numbers, continuous
monitoring of databases was cited by 65 percent of respondents as the
best way to avoid a breach of databases.

Are
we seeing a return to KGB days or something new? Possible a “Global
Warming War?” Stay tuned.

In
early March, a mysterious ship the size of a large passenger ferry
left a Romanian wharf, glided through the narrow strait that
separates Europe from Asia and plotted a course toward Scandinavia.
After a two-year refitting, the $250 million ship will begin its
mission: to snoop on Russia's activities in the Arctic.

"There
is a demand from our political leadership to describe what is going
on in this region," said Norway's military intelligence chief,
Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen.

…
Summer sea ice reached a record low in 2012 and scientific
projections suggest it could disappear completely this century. New
areas of open water already have allowed more shipping through the
Northern Sea Route north of Russia. The melt is also opening a new
energy frontier — the
Arctic is believed to hold 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil
and 30 percent of its untapped gas.

The
most accessible resources lie within national boundaries and are
undisputed. Security analysts say the risk of conflict lies further
ahead, if and when the ice melts enough to uncover resources in areas
where ownership is unclear. The U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway and
Russia are expected to have overlapping claims.

Pro-democracy
Hong Kongers have reacted angrily to a Chinese government white paper
affirming Beijing's "comprehensive jurisdiction" over the
territory, released days after more than 100,000 demonstrators
gathered in the city calling for greater rights.

The
14,500-word document, which stresses that Hong Kong does not have
"full autonomy" and comes under Beijing's oversight, was
released amid fierce debate between residents of the former British
colony over impending electoral reform and the nature of the "one
country, two systems" concept.

…
Hong Kong lawmaker Alan Leong, leader of the pro-democracy Civic
Party, said he was "completely taken aback" by the
document, which had sent a shiver up (his) spine."

"It
is a sea-change to our understanding of what 'one country, two
systems' should be," he said.

He
argued that the notion that judicial decisions made in Hong Kong
should take into account the needs of China was a new concept, and
one that was "totally repugnant to our understanding of the rule
of law as an institution which we hold very dear to our hearts."

Microsoft is challenging the authority of federal prosecutors to
force the giant technology company to hand over a customer’s email
stored in a data center in Ireland.

The
objection is believed to be the first time a corporation has
challenged a domestic search warrant seeking digital information
overseas. The case has attracted the concern of privacy groups and
major United States technology companies, which are already under
pressure from foreign governments worried that the personal data of
their citizens is not adequately protected in the data centers of
American companies.

Verizon
filed a brief on Tuesday, echoing Microsoft’s objections, and
more corporations are expected to join. The Electronic Frontier
Foundation is working on a brief supporting Microsoft. European
officials have expressed alarm.

In a court filing made public on Monday, Microsoft
said that if the judicial order to surrender the email stored
abroad is upheld, it “would violate international law and treaties,
and reduce the privacy protection of everyone on the planet.”

…
In his ruling
in April, James C. Francis, a magistrate judge in federal court
in New York, wrote, “Microsoft’s argument is simple, perhaps
deceptively so.”

Microsoft
contends that the rules that apply to a search warrant in the
physical world should apply online. The standard of proof for a
search warrant is “probable cause” and “particularity” —
that is, a person’s name and where the person, evidence or
information reside.

A
subpoena — the less powerful court-ordered investigation tool —
requires only that the information is “relevant to an ongoing
investigation.” But a subpoena, unlike a search warrant, requires
that the person being investigated be informed.

Judge
Francis, in his order, wrote that the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, created
an in-between category intended at the time to protect
people from indiscriminate data gathering that subpoenas might allow
of online communications. The result, he wrote, is “a hybrid: part
search warrant and part subpoena,” and applied to
information held in Microsoft’s data center overseas.

I
guess you can try any argument, but is “We're completely out of
control” the best they can do?

News
release:” “In an era of too-big-to-fail banks, we should have
known it was coming: An intelligence agency too big to rein in —
and brazen enough to say so. In a remarkable legal filing
on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal court that its spying
operations are too massive and technically complex to comply with an
order to preserve evidence. The NSA, in other words, now says that
it cannot comply with the rules that apply to any other party before
a court — the very rules that ensure legal accountability —
because it is too big.
The filing came in a long-running lawsuit
filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging the NSA’s
warrantless collection of Americans’ private data. Recently, the
plaintiffs in that case have fought to ensure that the NSA is
preserving relevant evidence — a standard obligation in any lawsuit
— and not destroying the very data that would show the agency spied
on the plaintiffs’ communications. Yet, as in so many other
instances, the NSA appears to believe it is exempt from the normal
rules.”

Amazon
has found a new place to sell and it doesn’t have anything to do
with books, DVDs or physical products.

Later
this year, the Seattle company will dive into local services,
launching a marketplace that will connect regional professionals and
businesses to consumers who could need anything from vocal lessons to
a kitchen remodel. The company will unveil the new development,
which was first reported by Reuters,
on a city-by-city basis, similar to what is being done for its
grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh.

…
Similar to Amazon, eBay has been testing a new product called eBay
Hire, which will place the profiles
of service professionals next to associated products that
consumers may be shopping for on its website. For example, a person
buying golf clubs on eBay may see ads or links referring them to a
local golf teacher who’s signed up with the eBay Hire platform.

…
Expertise may also keep Amazon from mastering the market, says
Zappacosta, who says that selling a professionals’ services are
much different than peddling commodities like shoes or electronics.

“You
can’t go after a few distributors and get all the titles,” he
says, making the comparison to books. “There’s
is no wholesaler than you can hook into that gives you
access to the market. You have to go professional to professional to
find them.”

Perspective.
Any way you slice it, that's a lot of data. Is “pay for
preferred routing” on existing networks the answer or is it higher
overall network speed?

Video consumption of the World Cup alone will generate nearly as much
Internet traffic as occurred in all of Australia
in 2013, according to a new Cisco
Systems Inc report that shows growth in Internet traffic is
fueled by video.

The report, which says video is expected to grow to 84 percent of
Internet traffic in the United States by 2018 from 78 percent
currently, raises questions about whether Internet service providers
should prioritize traffic, which has become a controversial issue.

For
the first time, a computer program has officially passed the Turing
Test, which measures a machine’s ability to think for itself — at
least under the standards set by a competition in Britain.

The
achievement, being hailed as a milestone for the field of artificial
intelligence, came Saturday in London at a competition organized by
the University of Reading involving five computer programs. Each was
tasked with persuading at least 30 percent of judges into mistaking
it for a human. The winner, a program named Eugene Goostman, tricked
33 percent of the judges into believing it was a 13-year-old,
non-native-English-speaking Ukrainian boy.

…
The Turing Test was originally proposed by British computer
scientist Alan Turing in a paper written in 1950, in which he wrote,
“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”

…
The winning entrant’s accomplishments suggest that people may soon
be able to hold conversations with computers that feel real.

“Siri
is just awful. You can’t have a conversation with Siri,” Denning
said, referring to the voice assistant for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
“People should be able to expect more. This shows it’s
possible.”

Quartz is reporting
a change to how iOS 8-equipped devices search out Wi-Fi networks
with which to connect. The new mobile operating system, which is on
track for a release in the fall, gives iOS 8 devices the ability to
identify themselves not with their unique burned-in hardware MAC
address but rather with a
random, software-supplied address instead.

Since
it debuted on Android several years ago, SwiftKey has been one of the
best paid apps available on the platform thanks to its gesture-based
typing and smart word prediction. Now the app has dropped its $4
price tag and gone completely free to use, but it will still cost if
you want to style the keyboard into something more to your liking.

…
A staggering 3.2 billion people are expected to watch at least one
match, with more than 1 billion expected to tune in to watch the
tournament’s final. We’ve already looked at some innovative ways
you can follow the tournament yourself, but if you’re one of
those 3.2 billion and you also own an Android phone, what apps do you
have available to keep abreast of the latest news and scores from the
64-game event?

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.